San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom wants owners of large commercial buildings in the city to conduct an energy audit within five years to secure their business license renewal - and to provide the results to the city, which will publish the information in a public database.

Potential tenants of the buildings could then use the information to decide if they want to rent space there, which Newsom compared to shopping for a car based on a particular model's gas mileage.

"As a tenant, you can compare and contrast and shop," he said. "This is so obvious and so rational and so doable."

Newsom made the announcement Friday at a news conference to tout the Transamerica Pyramid being awarded the LEED Gold Certification by the U.S. Green Building Council in recognition of a variety of energy and environmental upgrades. It becomes the city's 88th - and most famous - LEED-certified building.

"The Transamerica Pyramid is synonymous with San Francisco's skyline, and it is now an even more fitting emblem for the city by reflecting our core green values," Newsom said.

The mayor's administration is also putting the finishing touches on a program called SF Squared, which would allow property owners to fund environmental improvements to their buildings - related to energy efficiency, renewable energy and water conservation - by taking a loan from the city and paying it back over time through increased property taxes.

Readying legislation

The loan would be attached to the building rather than the owner so if the building were sold, the buyer would take on responsibility for the increased taxes. Similar programs exist in Berkeley, Sonoma County, Palm Desert and Boulder, Colo., and Newsom hopes to get his version up and running in early 2010.

Newsom's administration is preparing several pieces of legislation related to both the energy audits and SF Squared, all of which the mayor intends to present to the Board of Supervisors within the next several weeks.

The energy audit legislation will be based on recommendations made by a task force Newsom recently convened that studied how the city and private sector can accelerate energy improvements in existing commercial buildings. The task force set a goal of cutting in half energy use in commercial buildings by 2030, which the Department of the Environment says would be akin to taking 17,500 cars off the road every year.

The task force released a variety of recommendations Friday on how to cut energy use in commercial buildings, and those will be used to draft legislation including requiring owners to conduct energy audits and share the results.

For owners of buildings of less than 5,000 square feet - of which there are about 10,000 - an energy audit will be voluntary. Owners of larger buildings will have no choice and will have three to five years to conduct the audit depending on their buildings' size.

Services offered by the Department of the Environment and Pacific Gas and Electric can help pay for 40 to 75 percent of the costs of conducting an energy audit, Newsom said.

Building owners would be under no obligation to pay for the upgrades recommended by the audits, but Newsom said he expects many of them would opt to do so.

New York pushback

New York City earlier this month abandoned a similar plan - though it would have given building owners 10 years to conduct the audits - after pushback from building owners. Newsom said San Francisco's Building Owners and Managers Association supports the energy audit legislation.

Newsom, who frequently compares San Francisco's environmental progress to that of other cities, also pointed out that New York City has 76 LEED-certified buildings, 12 fewer than San Francisco despite being much larger. Los Angeles has 56.

Also, the Transamerica Pyramid beat New York's iconic Empire State Building, which is also undergoing a retrofit to achieve its LEED certification.

Green Pyramid

The Transamerica Pyramid has been awarded the LEED Gold Certification for a variety of energy upgrades. Here are the numbers behind the building's greening.

85 percent Use of transportation other than cars by tenants to get to work